bigger, on the football pitch, practising penalty after penalty, and as there are now when heâs banging on the drums.
And what is wrong with that?
Sometimes he gets the feeling people think thereâs something wrong with it, about life being about girls. But Daniel doesnât care about that. What he wants to do is get his own flat, whenever Child bloody Welfare will let him, work out a couple of times a week, get drunk at the weekends, play in a good band, get some gigs, release some records and get some stuff out on iTunes, YouTube and Spotify, maybe play a few festivals, maybe make a living playing music like Kvelertak, Purified in Blood and Kaizers Orchestra. Dejanâs brother â crazy all that stuff Dejan and his family went through in Serbia â Dejanâs brother knows a guy who knows one of the guitarists in Purified. Daniel and Dejan saw them at the
RÃ¥tt og RÃ¥de
festival, seriously kickass:
The sky is falling, death is calling, to the grave.
Itâs not just people in Rogaland who like them, people from Oslo like them too. He just needs to keep at it. If it doesnât work out heâll have to get a job, and heâs no wuss, even though his grades arenât great, pass candidate in every subject except PE. Heâs never shied away from work. If someone tells him to do something, heâll grit his teeth until his jaw aches and do the job, no matter how bloody dirty it is.
Then heâll spend the rest of his time, and money, on girls.
Thatâs what he feels is
meaningful
, as his foster mother and child protection officer say. And if anyone believes thatâs the wrong way to live your life, then they can just go on believing it. If they feel itâs wrong that he thinks girls are so fucking sexy, soft and gorgeous, and he wants to buy them stuff, like houses and make-up and whatever they want, then they can go on feeling itâs wrong.
Danielâs rock-hard fuckplan is to find a girl whoâs not a handful. She has to have her head screwed on and she canât have a face onher in the morning like sheâs sucking a lemon, and she canât spend three hours deciding what kind of jeans to buy. She has to think the jeans he wants her to wear are the best. Heâll be the one looking at her after all. Thatâs the kind of girl he wants for himself. A girl who likes the fact he thinks sheâs well gorgeous and well sexy, a girl who doesnât look at other boys and isnât running around flirting.
Who knows, maybe heâs already found that girl.
Because she is sexy, Sandra.
And she doesnât look at other boys. And she doesnât moan.
The test will be how often she wants to do it with him.
Itâll be a shambles if heâs together with a woman who only wants to do it a little while he wants to do it a lot. On average once a day, he reckons. So he canât be with someone who only wants it every four days. And thereâs one other thing thatâs just as important, and thatâs that she doesnât poke and pry. Heâs had enough of that already, from Child Welfare, foster parents, social workers and psychologists, so he doesnât want to be with a girl who pokes and pesters. Respect to Sandra, because sheâs twigged that. When something comes up in conversation that he canât face talking about, she looks at him with those well gorgeous eyes that make Daniel think of some kind of exotic bird, her lips glisten and itâs just like thereâs light in those three freckles on her nose, and that little mousy mouth of hers drives him nuts, the pursed lips with the slightly protruding teeth, and she gets it, gets that thereâs certain things you donât want to get into. Sheâs understood what all those childcare losers havenât: if you talk and talk and talk about things, pull them out of the ground like rabbits, then everything goes to shit.
Daniel glances up at the football pitch by